Vision gains Insight for service provider adoption

New distributor Insight to help channel adopt Cloud Protection and Recovery programme

Vision Solutions, a provider of information availability software and services has signed Insight UK as a distributor for its Cloud Protection and Recovery (CPR) programme.

The scheme uses a service provider licensing agreement to help resellers offer cloud-based recovery and data protection solutions.

Vision already uses Softcat and COMPAREX to offer its products to the channel via Service Provider Licencing Agreement (SPLA). However, Ian Masters, sales director for Northern Europe at Vision Solutions says the firm brought on Insight as it has “an extremely proactive approach to building up cloud opportunities, and that they were excited at the opportunity to not just migrate resellers over to providing cloud services, but building up long-term recurring revenue as well.”

Using Vision Solutions’ Double-Take products, Insight will help its reseller and service provider partners move customers quickly to cloud platforms, as well as assisting them in providing business continuity and recovery solutions as part of their cloud portfolios. The development of “cloud-based business continuity, availability and recovery opportunities with our service provider partners, and Vision’s Double-Take solution forms a critical part of that overall strategy,” adds Mark Green, EMEA director of Online & Cloud Computing at Insight.

Vision Solutions’ CPR programme offers a monthly use-based licensing payment structure. As partners sell cloud business continuity solutions to their customers, Insight and Vision Solutions only bill these service providers for the number of licences that are consumed each month. This flexibility in licensing helps the service provider manage their internal costs as they scale up the number of supported customers which the vendor claims offers better long-term growth and margin development based on recurring revenues.

The addition of Insight is part of a wider shift in the Vision’s channel, which has around 150 UK partners. Masters admits that the number of partners it interacts with directly has reduced to around 20 as it moves more of its business through distributors. However, its SPLA programme grew by around 40 percent over the last year, now with around 50 partners including Rise (the channel arm of Fasthosts), Phoenix (formerly ICM), Virtual DCS,Utilize, UKFast and Capital Support.

Masters also believes that the channel is a lot more focused on “selling their core services and competencies, rather than a broader portfolio of products,” which sits neatly with a SPLA and cloud licensing model.

Although the market for disaster recovery is crowded, Masters believes that at a technology level the firm has a key advantage. “Our USP has always been the ability to support different platforms and protect them all, rather than a subset. As opposed to other replication and availability solutions, Double-Take works across different hypervisors, cloud platforms and storage solutions.

“Why is this important for the channel? Well, it means not having to segment your market. Rather than having to run multiple different cloud products or virtual backup solutions, a cloud provider can run everything on one platform. This makes a big difference to cost of sale, as well as making it simpler to serve the end-customer. The promise of cloud is that users don't have to care about what platform they are running on,” he adds.